--- title: "How we put $7,179,450 of managed IT contracts on the book for an MSP in eight months. | Stone Haven Capital Group" description: "150 businesses signed at an average of $47,863, off a generic offer sent to essentially every company in North America the right size to buy it." canonical: "https://stonehaven.capital/showcase/managed-it-services-provider" last-updated: "2026-08-22" --- > 150 businesses signed at an average of $47,863, off a generic offer sent to essentially every company in North America the right size to buy it. Stone Haven Capital Group Schedule a Call Case study · Managed IT Services Provider # How we put $7,179,450 of managed IT contracts on the book for an MSP in eight months. 150 businesses signed at an average of $47,863, off a generic offer sent to essentially every company in North America the right size to buy it. Eight months. A managed services provider selling ordinary managed IT and helpdesk on a per-seat monthly contract. No vertical, no niche, no new sales hires. The widest programme we have run, and the numbers in it look like a wide programme rather than a tidy one. - $7,179,450 generated in 8 months, from 150 managed IT contracts at an average of $47,863. - 6,202,001 emails to 3,267,818 companies, producing 17,388 replies at 0.5%. - 3,017 interested conversations became 620 held meetings and 150 signed contracts. - What did most of the work: we kept every cold send off the domain the client's helpdesk runs on. - What went wrong: the bounce rate ran at 4.6% and had to be acknowledged mid-programme. 01 ## Did they get a good result? Yes, and the result came with soft numbers attached that we are going to print rather than round off. New business had been arriving through referral and the occasional local search, worth $2,316,000 on the book when we arrived. Eight months later the client had signed 150 contracts worth $7,179,450, a 3.1x increase, with 620 qualified opportunities worth $24,180,000 still open behind them. What happenedThe number Contracts signed150 Contract value generated$7,179,450 Average contract$47,863 Qualified opportunities620, worth $24,180,000 Interested conversations3,017, worth $81,459,000 Emails sent6,202,001 Businesses contacted3,267,818 Replies17,388, a 0.5% reply rate Positive replies3,017, 17.4% of all replies Bounces287,112, a 4.6% bounce rate Eight months at full width, as the platform recorded it. 02 ## Did you get them in front of the right people? Volume on its own proves nothing, and this programme has more volume than any other document we have written. 6,202,001 emails is a number anybody can produce the moment they stop caring who receives them. 150 businesses signed a managed IT contract at an average of $47,863. Behind them sit 620 qualified opportunities worth $24,180,000, and 3,017 interested conversations worth $81,459,000. The conversion is where targeting shows itself, and there was very little targeting here. 17,388 replies produced 3,017 positive ones, 620 of those cleared qualification and 150 signed. Roughly one in five positive replies turned into a real evaluation. That ratio held against a list about as unselective as a list can be, which is the first sign that the offer was doing the work the filtering was not. One month of booking, at the volume three million contacts actually produces. The pipeline the client worked from. 03 ## What did not work, and what we did about it Three things, and they come first here rather than sitting at the back, because a reader who already knows what went wrong reads everything after it properly. ### The bounce rate ran at 4.6% and had to be acknowledged mid-programme. 287,112 of 6,202,001 sends bounced. That is above where a properly built estate should sit and we are not going to call it anything else. A list of 3,267,818 small businesses cannot be scrubbed clean, because it decays faster than anyone can verify it. Owners change provider and lose the mailbox, single-person addresses close the week that person leaves, and a large share of small business domains are configured as catch-alls, which accept everything at verification and then reject it on delivery. What we changed: verification moved to a stricter provider partway through, catch-all domains were split out and sent to at a fraction of the rate, and any segment older than sixty days went back through verification before it was loaded again. The rate came down across the second half of the window without ever reaching where we build to, and at this width it was never going to. ### The first replies were answered by an automated agent before anyone read them. At 3,017 positive replies across eight months, a reply agent handled the first response and booked the call. For a prospect saying yes and asking for a time, it worked, and it worked faster than a person would have. The problem showed up on everything else. A question about what happens to an existing support contract got answered confidently and wrongly, and it got answered in a voice that belonged to nobody at the client. A scheduling reply the agent handled correctly. The badge above it is the tell. What we changed: the agent kept the replies it was good at, which were the ones proposing a time and nothing else. Anything carrying a question routed to a named person at the client before it left. Roughly one reply in four met that test, which was a workload a single person could carry. ### Time zones were ignored on sends for the first stretch. The list was national and the send schedule was not. Businesses four time zones away were receiving a cold email at four in the morning local, which put it underneath everything that arrived during their actual working day before anyone opened the inbox. What we changed: sends were bucketed by the recipient's local time and released inside working hours in that zone. It cost nothing to implement and should have been in the build from the first week. No programme of this size runs clean, and any case study reading as though one did has quietly deleted a section. The corrections above are the part of this engagement most likely to repeat on yours. 04 ## What worked, and why ### We kept every cold send off the domain the client's helpdesk runs on. An MSP sells reliability, so it cannot have its own mail landing in spam. Ticket notifications, escalations and monthly reports all leave the same domain, and none of the cold volume went anywhere near it. We stood up 1,175 dedicated sending domains carrying 3,524 mailboxes, every one authenticated on SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX before anything left them. Warmup ran on all 3,524 for the full eight months. Each mailbox was capped at 20 sends a day, which is what makes 6,202,001 sends across eight months arithmetically possible without a single mailbox behaving unusually. Inbox placement held at 89.0% across the estate, with zero account errors and 34 alerts raised over the whole engagement. The estate that carried three million contacts, none of it on the client's domain. The reason that holds: the domain carrying every client relationship stayed clean, while disposable infrastructure absorbed all of the risk. ### We made the offer generic on purpose and sent it to everybody who could buy it. The offer had nothing bespoke in it. Patching, backup, endpoint security, unlimited helpdesk, one number to call, priced per seat per month. No compliance specialism, no industry stack, no vertical positioning of any kind. At an average annual contract of $47,863 and roughly $70 a seat a month, the typical signing is a company of somewhere around 55 to 60 seats. The list matched the offer. It was built on job title, headcount band and geography, and on nothing else. No intent keywords, no technographics, no vertical filters, no exclusions beyond size and role. The raw pull came to 9,119,491 records, which reduced to 3,799,788 once the headcount band and the contact roles were enforced, and 3,267,818 businesses were actually contacted across the window. Working backwards, that is close to every company in the United States and Canada between 20 and 500 employees, at four or five reachable people inside each one. Depth per lead was the thing this design gave up. 6,202,001 sends across 3,267,818 businesses is 1.9 touches each, which is what an estate of this size can physically carry at that width. 1,054,198 leads, roughly a third, had finished the full two-step sequence by the time the window closed. The rest were still mid-flight. A short sequence completes quickly only for the leads that entered early, and on a list this large most of them entered late. ### The opener led with the offer and ended on a question. It stated what the client sells and roughly what it costs to run, then asked one question about how their IT is handled today. A first name and a company name were merged in and that was the whole of it. There was no researched line, because there was nothing to research with: the list carried a job title, a headcount and a city. An office manager can tell inside a line whether this is relevant, and the ones for whom it is not simply do not answer. Every email went out as plain text, spun line by line, so the estate never sent the same string twice. The winning opener: four lines, a merged first name, and no researched line anywhere in it. Two steps, one wait, and seven versions of the same short email. The reason that holds: a researched opening line is what you reach for when the offer needs explaining. Managed IT at a fixed price per seat explains itself. Dropping that line cost some reply rate and bought the ability to run one email against three and a quarter million companies with no research step in front of it. ### The cadence was two touches with a single four-day gap. Two steps, one wait, seven variations on the opener all running against each other. Nothing after the second email. A business that has not answered twice is one to approach again in a future window rather than one to keep writing to, and at this width there is always another million companies who have not been approached once. The reason that holds: 17,388 replies came back, alongside 42,398 out of office responses at 1.3%. Two touches is enough to surface the businesses whose contract is up or whose current provider has annoyed them once too often. A third and a fourth mostly find the same people again, and the same send capacity spent on new companies finds new ones. ### We reviewed the openers weekly and killed the losers inside days. Seven opener variations against a 0.5% reply rate means the gap between the best and the worst is worth thousands of conversations across a window this size. With no research line and no segmentation available, the wording of the opener was the only lever left, so it got reviewed weekly and judged on the share of replies that came back positive rather than on reply count. That share finished at 17.4%. 05 ## The three angles we test, in every market The market decides which message works, and the only way to find out is to ask it. Here the opener ran three variations at once and the reply data named the winner. Three was the right number for this particular programme. A generic offer sent to 3,267,818 businesses on title and headcount alone does not reward subtlety, and splitting the volume across more angles than that would have produced months of inconclusive data on an engagement that only ran for eight. 06 ## 1. The direct pitch Say what you sell and what it costs in one sentence, then ask whether it is needed. Works in markets where the buyer is busy, unglamorous and would rather be told than warmed up. We run managed IT and helpdesk for companies your size on a flat monthly fee per seat. Who looks after yours at the moment? 07 ## 2. Pain led Name the constraint they live with, in the words they would use themselves, then ask whether it is true for them. Lands hardest when the problem is something everyone in the sector complains about privately. Most offices we talk to are waiting a day or more for a ticket to get picked up. Is that roughly where you are? 08 ## 3. Risk reversal Take the risk off their side of the table. No lock-in, no commitment they cannot walk away from. Carries markets where the buyer has been burned by a previous supplier and expects to be again. No long contract and you can leave on thirty days. If the response times are not better in the first month, there is nothing holding you. 09 ## How we use them All three go out together across a split list from the first week. Within a month the replies have already said which one this market wants, and the others come off before they spend any more contacts. Which one wins is not predictable in advance. That one of them will win is. Running three at once turns a guess into a measurement. The same three port to LinkedIn with shorter wording and the same underlying logic. 10 ## Why this works for managed IT specifically The MSPs we talk to are constrained in the same place. The service is good, retention is high, and every client on the book arrived through somebody who already knew them. Referral is an excellent acquisition channel right up to the point where you want to double. Three things make this market unusually suited to outbound: - Everybody is a buyer. Any company of the right size has computers, has someone unhappy about them, and has a provider or an overstretched internal person. That is why no vertical filter was needed. The businesses that actually signed turned out to be professional services firms, clinics, light manufacturers and regional retailers, and none of that was decided in advance. - The contract recurs. At an average of $47,863, a small number of signings covers the cost of the programme and then does it again the following year without anybody sending another email. - The question is easy to answer without a call. Asking how a company handles IT today takes one line to reply to, which is why 17.4% of replies came back positive even against a list assembled on headcount and job title alone. 11 ## Why would this work for your business? Possibly it would not. The table below is the quickest way to find out and it costs nothing to read down. This works ifThis does not work if You sell a recurring contract worth four or five figures a yearYour revenue is one-off project work with nothing renewing behind it Your addressable market runs to millions of companies and you can price the same offer for all of themEvery deal needs bespoke scoping before anyone can say yes The service is genuinely good and clients stay once they signRetention is the problem and acquisition is not One person can own replies and answer every prospect consistentlyNobody internally has time to carry an inbound conversation You can absorb a step change in new clients without service quality fallingYou are already at capacity and delivering late Landing on the left of that table means the method transfers, because there was nothing exceptional about this client. A regional MSP with good service, strong retention and no way at all of reaching anybody outside its own referral network. What produced the result was the process, and it runs the same way against your market as it did against theirs. 12 ## One more thing worth understanding Three of the numbers in this document are worse than the ones you will see in most case studies. A 0.5% reply rate sits at the bottom of the usable band. A 4.6% bounce rate is above where we build to. 1.9 touches per lead is barely a sequence at all. All three are the same fact, viewed from three directions. That fact is width. Nothing in the opener is researched, so nothing is lifting the reply rate. The list runs to 3,267,818 small businesses, so it rots faster than verification can keep up and the bounce rate reflects that. The estate carried 3,524 mailboxes at 20 sends a day, so covering that many companies at all meant 1.9 touches each rather than five or six. Narrow the programme and every one of those figures improves. So does nothing else. Because the number that did not soften is the one that mattered. 17.4% of replies came back positive, which is a normal figure, from a list with no targeting intelligence in it whatsoever. An offer that a person can accept or decline without a discovery call does not need the reply rate to be flattering. It needs enough replies, and at 6,202,001 sends there were 17,388 of them. So this is what maximum breadth actually looks like when nobody edits the export. Soft rates, a bounce figure we had to own mid-programme, a third of the list still unfinished when the window closed, 150 signed contracts and $7,179,450 on the book. If that reads as less polished than the case studies you are used to, that is the honest shape of the trade, and the tidy ones have usually had a number like 4.6% quietly removed. 13 ## Before and after What changedBefore After Where new clients came fromReferral and local search 3,267,818 businesses contacted directly Contract value on the book$2,316,000 $7,179,450 Contracts signed in the windowNot tracked as a number 150 Growth on the baselineFlat year on year 3.1x Sending infrastructureThe company's own domain 1,175 domains and 3,524 mailboxes 14 ## If you want to know whether your market has this in it A short call is enough. Tell us the size of business you want on contract and what one is worth across a year. We come back with how many of them are genuinely reachable, what conversation volume is realistic against that number, and whether outbound is the right instrument for you at all. If the answer is that it is not, you will hear that on the call. Neither of us gains anything from discovering it four months into a programme. ## Want to know whether your market has this in it? The first conversation is short. You tell us who your buyers are and what one is worth to you. We tell you how many we can actually reach, what the meeting volume looks like, and whether outbound is the right lever for you at all. If we think it is not, we will say so. 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